Lost Souls and Hidey Holes

Another diversion, another 12 hours of bus time. We were heading to Tierradentro, an archaeological site hosting Pre-Columbian tombs and statues of animals, gods and men. This was also the closest that we would be going to the so called F.A.R.C territory, travelling to around 30km from the once front line (Columbia's equivalent to the Ghaza Strip) between the Government and the Guerillas. We boarded an early bus which would take around 6 hours, travelling out of the relatively grimey city of Popyan into lush green sub-tropical mountains.

The local bus stopped sporadically along the way picking up welly-clad farmers holding baskets of vegetables, buckets of milk and other various items straight from the ground/tit. The clouds rolled in and the weather turned surprisingly cold as the landscape began to resemble a wilder Welsh countryside, and we bumped along the rough gravel track. Later we arrived at a town called Izca to experience our first real police check, which involved them routinely toothcombing through the bus and everyones bags for drugs (us) and semi automatic sub machine guns (one would assume).

After returning to our seats we hit the road again to be dropped off at a random crossroads in the middle of nowhere. Luckily an old man and woman turned up in an equally old lorry and offered us a lift. We gladly accepted and spent the short journey happily chatting with the old couple. Once dropped, we found lodgings before schmoozing down to the museum, stopping for a brief chat with every local who passed. It was already beginning to dawn on us how friendly and happy to help everyone was, which was a large difference to the rather rude local receptions in Peru and Bolivia. The small museum was just that, small, but quite interesting, and since we had arrived too late to visit the tombs, we gathered a map and walked up to watch the sunset from a beautiful viewpoint hosting some of the aforementioned statues and some not so statuesque local children, keen to show us their trees climbing skills. We returned, ate well and retired early to enable an early bird start to the tombs the next morning.

In spite of a hard bed dipping as low as the current U.S. Economy, we managed to raise, pack and leave pretty early, breakfasting before climbing up through the forest to the first set of tombs. The guard at the top happily chatted about the chambers for a bit before giving us a lemon and letting us in for a peruse. These were not lit, so we used out torches to explore the perfectly preserved burial places. It's difficult to fully detail them, but they were fascinating, displaying carvings and paintings of no-one knows what (literally, since historians no nothing about these people).

The second set of tombs took around an hour to descend and climb to, and were lit well enough to really see the ornate pillars, bone holes and pottery. Sadly we had a bus to catch approaching and had to return to the village in time to get back to Popoyan. We arrived late and went to bed early after Emily began to feel unwell. The following day we would leave for Cali, where some overdue party time was required.